As Internet commerce continues to expand, web sites continue to display increasing amounts of information and grow in complexity. For example, a merchant's web page may sell a variety of commercial products and product accessories. In this example, the various products and product accessories may be produced by a variety of manufacturers and may be available in numerous option combinations, such as combinations of color, size, storage capacity, etc. As a result, the merchant's web site may be capable of rendering thousands of web pages to display the products and product accessories for sale.
During the rendering or modification of a web site, efficient information retrieval from backend databases is an increasingly challenging problem, especially when multiple disparate data sources are used to form a single web page. In particular, the merchant's business user may encounter difficulties when making changes to the web site. Efficiently implementing such changes on one or more subsets of web pages has so far been difficult.
In addition, web sites may be assembled from multiple data sources. In addition, business users are typically non-technical and frequently do not understand the configuration of underlying data sources used to assemble web pages. Further, related management tools do not adequately provide the ability for business users to predict how changes to content will appear in the context of the end user's experience. As a result, business users often operate in a non-interactive mode, and only discover the implications of their design changes after the fact.